A Forgotten Monstrous Gem of a Pinball

You probably know about this yourself. It is that itch to get a new machine in your game room.

It just hits you after awhile.

As great as your list of games may be — eventually you just have the hunger for something new.

If you have unlimited game funds and space — this is not a very big challenge.

But most of us have a limited budget and arcade games and pinball machines are huge — so we have very limited space also.

That was my situation.

I could make room for one more pinball machine; buy only had a few thousand bones in the gameroom budget.

I could build up the slush fund and get a new Stern later…but wanted to scratch that itch now.

So what to do?

I cannot just buy any game, as my gameroom is up a brutal three flights of stairs.

So I am very careful about what I buy and cannot sit back and pull the slot machine trigger on just anything.

The game needs to be seriously good and something I can live with for several years before I haul it up there.

There are great games that everyone raves about that never made it out of the garage into my gameroom.

Medieval Madness did not make it (requires too many boring shots up the middle, castle exploding gets super old after see it for the 10th time, etc.)

Theatre of Magic did not make it (game software is just not good at all, despite great art, theme, and nice layout).

The challenge was to find an awesome pinball machine at a $2000 budget. Is this even possible today?

With inflation even some pretty lame games are selling for much more than that.

This was going to require some seriously out of the box thinking — as I have already gone through and gotten tired of many of the great bargain games.

Judge Dredd I have already owned about 5 times, Fish Tales about 3 times, Johnny Mnemonic twice, well you are getting the drift.

I did finally find it though, but I had to research long and hard.

Let me tell you about this game and let you decide if it sounds like it should be a bargain basement game.

Here are some great features:

Beautiful hand drawn artwork by one of the all time masters of pinball art.

Unique toy that throws pinballs at you.

Fast paced layout by John Borg with great orbit shots and three flippers.

Small production run of only 3,000 games — which typically makes games go up in value.

Great horror theme that everyone on the planet is familiar with.

Giant DMD that dwarfs the size of a regular DMD.

I guess by now you might realize I am talking about Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein by Sega.

Sega pinballs are not very well respected. Maybe for good reason in some cases.

Although Frankenstein is basically a Data East pinball — as it was already in the works before Data East sold to Sega.

What else kept this machine down in terms of price and reputation?

One big thing was a flaw in the design. The original flipper coils on the two bottom flippers are not strong enough for the game to play properly.

The ramp is very steep to reach over on top of the Frankenstein’s monster toy.

Even after rebuilding my game with entirely new flippers, I could barely make the right ramp, lots of shots would only go up half way, I could not backhand anything, and game play was boringly slow.

When you upgrade the flippers with these coils it shines and transforms the game. With these upgraded coils you can nail the ramp, can even backhand the ramp if you hit it right, and the ball screams all over the place.

Frankenstein, like most games of that time, is a dark in terms of the lighting in some areas. I added a few LED lights here and there and it helps make things easier to see.